Observing and Monitoring the Ruins: A Public Sphere Between Disappearance and Emergence
Our memories are bound to particular places, and cities therefore become intertwined with the memories of those who once lived or continue to live there, carrying within them a collective memory. For the citizens of Gwangju, the Jeonnam Textile and Ilshin Textile factories are sites marked by the painful history of exploitation under Japanese colonial rule. At the same time, they symbolize the era of industrialization in Gwangju and the Jeonnam region following liberation, making them places where conflicting feelings of attachment and resentment coexist.
For 86 years, textile machinery operated amid temperatures reaching 40°C and a thunderous roar of the factories, until the machines came to a complete stop in 2020. As of 2026, most of the 27 buildings have been demolished, leaving only a handful of preserved spaces on the now-leveled site. In their place stand enormous cranes and drilling machines, symbols of the mechanisms of capital.
Once a site of production where the grueling labor of countless workers wore down their bodies and brought forth “salt flowers” of sweat, the factories are now being rapidly transformed into a new urban space shaped by capital. Amid this turbulent transition, in which both the function and physical form of the site are being completely altered, we ask: How do the memories and accumulated time of labor that sustained an era relate to the urban landscape of today? What historical realities are disappearing behind the overwhelming noise of development and the barriers surrounding the construction site? What will we choose to preserve and remember?
Faced with the logic of large-scale development, this exhibition uses artistic intervention to reconsider the sense of place of modern industrial heritage as it becomes increasingly privatized and obscured. It proposes the site anew as a public sphere in which space and time can be freely reterritorialized. By tracing the visible and invisible transformations taking place on the ground being demolished, the exhibition gazes upon the ruins and brings future-oriented imagination to the collective memories inscribed within them.
The three participating artists reconstruct the historical and sociocultural significance of the site through multiple sensory layers,, working with installation and sound.
Kang Dong-Ho uses embroidery, pulleys, salt-flower lace, and installations of fabric cracked with wax to give structure to the forces of labor amid demolition and reconstruction. Her work makes visible both the continuity and the lingering tensions between the lives of women workers in the past and labor at present-day construction sites.
An Se-Eun works with temporary partition walls that vibrating with sound and fragmented photographic collages. By overlapping the spatial and temporal dimensions of labor in the former textile factories with those of the present-day redevelopment site, her work brings attention to the value of labor and the memory of the land being concealed beneath smooth surfaces.
BakShim Jung-Hoon summons the voices of two women workers amid the vanished roar of the textile factories and the noise of present-day construction. Through ferrofluid that responds to their voices, the work suggests that attention to and careful listening to memory are what allow the history of a place to endure.
Just as loosely assembled support structures are hidden behind the seemingly solid and complete boundaries of construction-site barriers, beneath the polished surface of the city to come lie the concealed histories of labor and the lives of those who shaped the place.
